Who is More Evil, Apple or Microsoft?

Up until now I’ve always thought that while Apple wins hands down in the technology department, it was more closed, proprietary, anti-competitive and fascist in regards to treating its customers.

Think again: How Vista Lets Microsoft Lock Users In.

The fact of the matter is these companies are spending far more dollars on figuring out how to control their users than they are on innovative new products. Unfortunately, the capitalist system, which was once the glory of the western world is starting to crumble under the weight of excessive legislation (e.g. broken patent laws, DMCA, etc.)

Only you can help fix this – by refusing to fund these activities by boycotting these companies. Choose an open system like Linux.

IE7 Issues

As with any new browser, you have to do some testing and tweaking to get stuff to work. MathSciNet required some twiddling to get IE7 working correctly. I had three main issues to work through.

• visibility: hidden; didn’t work correctly in my style-sheet. The folders on the front page are divs layered over each other. I was using visibility: hidden to hide them and visibility: visible to make them visible. I had to switch to using display: none; and display: block; That solved the problem.
• PNGs with 8-bit transparency are now handled correctly. I was using proprietary Microsoft CSS statements to make this work in IE6 and lower. In IE7 both methods were being used and so I had two logos overlapping each other. I had to make a minor tweak to hide the proprietary method from IE7.
  

  a#logo {
  position: absolute;
  top: 15px;
  left: 0;
  padding: 0;
  width: 377px;
  height: 47px;
  display: block;
  filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader( src=’/mathscinet/images/logo.png’, sizingMethod=’scale’ );
  }

  a#logo, [junk=junk] { /* this hack is invisible to IE6 and lower */ background-image: url(/mathscinet/images/logo.png);
  filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader( src=” ); /* this turns off the proprietary method */ }

• The obj.offsetTop and obj.offsetLeft DOM properties work differently in IE7 than any other browser. I had to detect IE7 and then use obj.offsetParent.offsetLeft + obj.offsetLeft to get things to line up properly. I detected IE7 with:
  

  var ie7=document.all && window.XMLHttpRequest && !window.opera;
  if( ie7 ){
  …
  }

Patent Insanity

Here we go again.

Apple has bought the rights to a patent that may allow it to charge royalties for nearly any downloaded digital media. Either it is simply defending itself by buying this patent, or it is planning a major assault on all the other download services. My bet is on the latter.

Personally, I hope the whole digital download industry collapses in a heap. Companies can’t seem to understand that people shouldn’t be bound by ugly DRM schemes. I refuse to use any service that ties me to some use scheme chosen by some bigwigs who think they should decide how I use the music I just bought. And so should you.